Now more than every short visual content is what many students love.
We’d love to know, what YouTube channels do you use in your history teaching?
Why do you use them?
What age group are they best for?
What teaching style do they suit?
How do you build them into your lessons?
I’ll start!
I love using OverSimplified.
I send a link out a few days before we start a new topic and have students watch it as preparation. The videos are short, funny, and brilliantly simple, they give students a clear overview of the basics before we dive deeper in class.
It saves me time creating introductory material, and it means students arrive with some shared foundational knowledge.
I’ve generally enjoyed NBC News Learn’s channel, although it’s far more U.S. History focused (I love their Simon Bolivar video though). Encyclopedia Britannica has some good videos as well, although a few of them my students found hard to understand.
Great list! OverSimplified and Crash Course World History are both staples in my classroom too, and TED-Ed works really well for visual learners.
A couple I’d add: Extra History, whose mini-series format suits a week-long unit nicely, and Feature History for quick overviews when time’s tight. Both fit that same short-and-engaging style people are describing here.
I just have to mention here that we know that World History Encyclopedia’s YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/@WorldHistoryEncyclopedia is also used in many schools around the world. We’ve heard from teachers and students that they show our videos in class.
